Asklemmy

Why live? What's the meaning of life? What's the purpose of life? I hope I don't have to explain that people have been asking this question since we first were able to form words and start thinking. You're going to get as many different opinions to answer this question as there are people to write a response. You could spend a lifetime studying philosophy and not find a definitive answer. And in the end you just have to decide for yourself which answer most speaks to you. Are you atheist, materialist, spiritual, philosophical? Take your pick.

Personally, I like Buddhist philosophy for these kinds of questions. And I suspect the Buddha would say that we are here because of craving for sense pleasures, craving for existence, and ignorance of our true nature and the true nature of reality. We live because we want to exist, we want to have experiences and feel the things that are available to us as living beings. Whether it's food or sex or money or adventure or admiration or love we feel like getting the things we want will make us happy. The flip side of craving is aversion, where we feel like achieving separation from those things that are unpleasant will make us happy.

Volumes have been written about this and it's impossible to summarize well in a single post. But if it speaks to you there's a lot more to say about it.

Nothing lasts [...] are we just amusing ourselves until death?

It seems to me like you are of the opinion that the finiteness of life robs it of meaning. If so, why not contribute to longevity research? It's only been a couple decades since we learned how telomeres relate to senescence. If enough people work on the problem or donate to it, we very well might be able to crack immortality before you croak. At the very least, that will give you a few more centuries to figure out what the meaning of life is.

You might object that immortality would lead to great wealth inequality, and you'd rather live a finite life than an unfair life. You can only believe this if you believe that the finality of life does not ultimately make life worthless. In which case, why not contribute to the cause of socialism?

Literally? There is no reason for life. Which scares people, so they develop superstition (theology) or ascribe it to emotions (happiness, suffering, etc). There is no reason, for life. The reason for life existing or how it came to be is certainly up for debate, but there is no why. We are alive, we are conscious. Eventually our bodies give out on us, and our life ends.

I like to recall some wise words of Christmas in these dark times:

Here’s the deal, newbie. You can stuff your stocking with shiny little toys from now until you grow some testicles, but until that stocking is filled with friendship, loyalty, love and devotion, well.. it’s just plumb empty.

And no, you can’t purchase those things at Laura Ashley. And no, you can’t win them in the red book giveaway extravaganza. And, gee, I’m sure if these aren’t things that you can wind up and watch spin for eight hours.

Let me make this exceptionally clear. Christmas is about love. You can’t live without other people’s love. Not during Christmas, not ever.

So go spend this time with your friends and family. And if they laugh at you, laugh with them. And if they laugh at you again, hit them and go find some new friends. But for the love of god, jesus, Mary, and Joseph and his technicolor dreamcoat, don’t ever ever forget this, newbie. You have to give love to get love. So start giving. Now.

On a fundamental level there is absolutely no meaning to life, it happened randomly over great great spans of time.

On a human level the meaning of life is enjoying it to the best of your ability.

This is the first post I've ever seen that's gotten twitter-style ratio'd. There are more comments than votes.

The point is to have a bigger car than your neighbour!

To laugh at the absurdity of it all.

And if you ask Vonnegut; to fart around.

I think I have found meaning in kindness and beauty. Anything I do to make life more worth living for other beings makes my life more meaningful. Finding beauty, wherever it may be and whatever form it may take, gives my life meaning.

I often say that the meaning of life is the smile in a dog's eyes when you pet it, and I think that serves nicely.

There's no right answer.

By that, I mean everyone dies with regrets: regrets about living too wildly, regrets about living too conservatively, having kids, not having kids, missing out on an opportunity, or risking too much.

You're going to reach the end of your life and believe it's unfinished, it seems.

I have no advice. Make the best choice at the moment, with all you know at the time, and then forgive yourself for it, I guess.

First of all.
Life has no inherent meaning; there is no grand plan or objective purpose to your life or any other persons.
Thus; what you choose has meaning is objectively meaningful (to you).

On a grander scale. As far as we know currently, we are the only example of advanced intelligence in the universe. We are almost certainly not; but we have no evidence at this stage. This is objectively meaningful; for humanity as a whole, if you choose to participate in ensuring the continuation of the only example of intelligence is totally up to you. As long as some people choose to continue the species intelligence continues in the universe.

This is a fun question to ponder, and you'll get a thousand different answers from a thousand different people.

I think the more important question (and much harder to find an answer for) is What's the meaning of the universe? Why does the universe exist? How was it created? Why was it created? What was before the universe was created? What comes after the universe?

And you can join those two questions together. Are the two related? Is the universe's purpose to create life? Is life's purpose to experience the universe? Would the universe exist if there was not life to experience it?

Procreation and survival. That's what all living beings have as an instinct and that's the only meaning behind it. It's merely a mechanism to prevail and improve.

Absurdists unite!

You get to create your own meaning. It becomes challenging when your meaning isn’t the default societal milestones, in the western world it’s - college, promotion, marriage/kids, house, retirement, death. If that progress doesn’t resonate, then it means that you have to connect to yourself on a deeper level to figure out your purpose/your life theme.

My purpose is organizing my internal world for self alignment, I do it through self expression using art, language and diagrams. I live for self expression.

Essentially I think you're right, we are amusing ourselves. The point is that we seem to be built to do that - we come with a nice set of compulsions that give us happy feelings when we do certain things, and if those feelings are an illusion so what? They feel real.

Optimistic Nihilism baby. Basically, if nothing we do matters in the long run, then live each day to be happy while helping to make others around you as comfortable as you can while we all take the ride.

https://youtu.be/MBRqu0YOH14

The answer is that there's no one answer. Since people find it, since people make it, and some people don't think it exists. I'm that last one, just killing time until sweet oblivion finally claims me.

Idk if there is really a meaning. I think it's all kinda chaos. So much of life is out of our control, and I think meaning is something people assign to themselves to gain a sense of control.

Try to be grateful for whatever you have, embrace the things you enjoy doing and maximize your time with other people that get you. When you find yourself doing something that you enjoy doing try to really be present in moment. Think about how you're feeling and why you're feeling that way. Even the way your body physically feels in that moment.

If you want to find an easy meaning or purpose try to remember even little waves can travel pretty far. Try to be kind and patient with others when they make mistakes, leave things a little better than they were when you found them, that kind of thing.

I work at a hospital and most of the patients there are definitely older than dirt people getting surgeries just to extend their life a few years or even months. Most of the time it is family members making those decisions because they don't want or know how to say goodbye. We have had patients that effectively died, but the family insists on keeping their organs alive with machines in the hopes that they wake up.

As for the meaning of life? I think it is 100% to entertain ourselves until death. Even if there was a greater meaning created by some deity, we're probably not able to understand it anymore than a donkey could understand calculus. I personally could never trust any human to tell me who or what god is and/or wants. And god has yet to reveal theirself to me...

For me, i like to look at Life like beeing on an adventure over time. The Goal is death, but that Goal is meaningless, as long as the journey to it was meaningless. The adventure itself could have been good, bad, regular or irregular, it does not matter. Experiencing those Things was the meaning to that adventure. As we had no choice, no say in being born, therefore starting this adventure involuntarily, we should Not try to move along the adventures voluntarily. Death will come involuntarily too, so there is no point in stopping it short (reducing the meaning of said adventure before our Goal is reached).

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced

Yes! Do what you enjoy as long as it’s not harming others. Whatever that is

Negative utilitarianism posits that reducing suffering is the ultimate moral imperative.

Everything, and at the same time nothing.

None

are we just amusing ourselves until death?

Yes, exactly that. There is nothing afterwards, and the fact that we're clinging to the surface of a rock flying through an infinite universe where we could be wiped out any second and never be able to do anything about it does rather make everything seem rather pointless.

And whilst you could be depressed about that, there's still a lot of pretty awesome things to do that amusing with. Nature is beautiful. The world and its geology is beautiful. Evolution is beautiful. Science is beautiful. Maths is beautiful (if you have the sort of mind that appreciates it). Learning about these things and experiencing them is beautiful. And so on. Even most people all over the world are pretty good most of the time, despite what some other people want you to believe.

And honestly, accepting there's no greater purpose is remarkably freeing. When something happens, it's just bad luck. It's not some greater power punishing you, it's not because you did something wrong (within reason - getting hit by a bus because you crossed the road without looking is really pushing the concept).

You are asking as a mind alienated from its body. Your body has interests that are not your interests, and it uses suffering to bend you to advance its interests for it. We all exist in a state of conflict with our own biological inheritance.

Our bodies generate a mind to suffer on its behalf, because without awareness it isn't really capable of suffering. That is the point of your existence as a mind. You exist to suffer on behalf of something that is not capable of suffering on its own, so that by your aversion to suffering, you will make choices that are in the interests of your body.

You have to decide whether to simply adopt the interests of your body, or whether to try to hold on to your own interests and make that the point of your life.

You have total free will. You can choose to follow or break the laws, you can go do drugs or be a hobo somewhere if that's the life you want to live.

Life is just your will to do something. And if you lose the freedom and will to do anything, you're, in my mind, already dead.

It's what you make of it. Some people don't make anything with theirs.

Personally, for me it's to form community and to leave a positive lasting influence on others. Except fascists, they can rot in hell. For others, it might be to learn as much as they can or to impart their wisdom onto their children.

I would argue we have a whole list of purposes:

• procreate
• copulate
• mate
• engage in sexual reproduction
• propagate the species
• reproduce
• conceive life
• bring forth offspring
• weave new generations
• kindle the spark of life
• sow the seeds of tomorrow
• whip up some womb-biscuits
• bake a bun in the baby oven
• start a stork-summoning ritual
• do the chromosome cha-cha
• know each other in the biblical sense
• lie together
• hook up
• get it on
• do the deed
• bump uglies
• initiate a genetic merge request
• fork the DNA repo
• compile the next generation
• instantiate another human

I think you got the gist.

And in the meantime also entertain ourselves, of course.

Lots of interesting answers here. I figured I'll pitch in too.

IMHO there is no one true, universal meaning of life - just as there is no one meaning of any piece of art. I think the idea that everything around you must have a single meaning is a relatively modern one, which came from the requirements of efficient communication (which should indeed be precise and not open to interpretation).

As it stands, it is up to you to interpret the world around you and find different meanings for yourself, just as you should do with art. If you are struggling to start, consider those questions: What do you enjoy? What makes you happy? What do you think is "good", even if it makes you sad or uncomfortable? All those things are your personal interpretations of meaning of life. Or go ahead and make up something else, I'm not your dad.

I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?

As for this, I think when people realize the proximity of death and temporal nature of their life, they are much better at coming up with meanings. Maybe it is to see your partner or your children for a couple more years. Maybe it's another couple of gaming sessions with your pals. Whatever it is, when you realize you don't have much of it left, the importance of it typically rises dramatically from your perspective. If you're struggling to visualize something so dramatic, imagine that your favourite food will be completely banned and criminalized in your country in couple weeks. Wouldn't you want to enjoy it more before that happens?

I’ve always preferred Wittgenstein’s distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. From that view, questions like ‘What is the meaning of life?’ don’t actually have an answer, because life itself lies outside language. It doesn’t need to be explained; it shows itself in the act of living. Trying to express it in words is already a kind of nonsense, because we’re asking language to do what only experience can. That’s why any attempt to describe it feels ‘mystical’ (not in a supernatural sense, but because it reveals something that cannot be captured by propositions). In this sense, the meaning of life is life itself; the ongoing activity of living.

There's so much to explore. Not just physical locations, but our own minds and each other's too. Learning about the laws of the universe, history, and seeing what's to come. Even pain is a thing to be experienced that the dead don't get to.

Is all that meaningless? All of us contain our own universe within us. Sure, it would be nice to care about all the other people (if there are other people) and what impact I have on them. But if in the long run nothing I do matters to them, fuck it. I'm mainly concerned with what's going on in here.

Life has no meaning, no purpose. Luckily enough we are social animals, which creates a (genetic) framework in which we feel good. Enjoy yourself, when it’s over it’s over 👍🏽😊 I also believe humanity will go through a population collapse in the next 50-200 years… we may actually go extinct. But this beautiful planet with all kinds of beautiful creatures will survive 🎉😍

If you have a worldview that includes gods, spirits, fairies, the universe as an entity, etc., that worldview often also provides you with the "meaning" bit. It can be stifling, reassuring, motivating, or depressing, depending. That was me for a few decades. Without that set of beliefs there is no built-in meaning afaik. You can study the stars or atoms or human behavior or plants your whole life and those things will not reveal a purpose or meaning for you, the universe, or humanity.

In the absence (for me) of any built-in meaning or purpose, we make our own meanings. If your meaning is "nothing matters so fuck it," that is the meaning you are choosing or accepting as some kind of default. Like many other people I choose meanings around happiness: the greatest good for the greatest number, as Spock (and probably some lesser figure) said. In this mechanistic universe we somehow came to be, and we can think and feel and understand and learn. That is almost unimaginably amazing to me. We are people, not just idk viruses grinding away. I choose a set of meanings that value people and their happiness. Life is miraculous and apparently rare. In that special group we, humans, are the most phenomenal thing we know of in the universe. I choose to value us.